What are the best sites for streaming fitness videos?January 7, 2013 7:42 AMSubscribe

What are the best sites for streaming fitness videos?

Like so many people do each January, I've decided that I need to incorporate more exercise into my life. I'm having trouble deciding what I want to do so I thought I'd try out some fitness videos to see what would work for me. I'm trying to go with a Health at Every Size philosophy - eat well, get exercise and not get hung up about the numbers.

I had originally planned to try videos through Netflix but I see that they no longer have the license to show them there. I see that there are sites that do memberships where you have access to lots of videos. What ones have you used and recommend? I'm happy to pay for a membership if the quality and variety is good.

I'm a woman nearing my mid-30s, overweight and will probably be doing these videos with a four year-old providing colour commentary at least some of the time.

I'm particularly interested in yoga and Pilates, but don't want to close myself off from general fitness videos.

I quite enjoy Zuzka Light's HIIT workouts. Very short, but intense, and there's always a portion where she details the form of the movement to make sure you can do it right and not injure yourself.

I also enjoy Tatianna Karmanova's Loving Fit for similar style of workouts. I like her approach a little bit better than Zuzka's actually, because she has a lot of notes on structuring your workout beyond what's shown in each video, such as having a proper warmup and stretching afterwards.posted by Kurichina at 8:34 AM on January 7, 2013

Like you, I'm in my mid-30s with young kids and have been trying to get back into a regular exercise habit. About a month ago, I joined FitnessGlo and have really liked it so far. For $12/month, it has a variety of streaming videos and tracks your daily exercise (you have to click on the tracking, so it's there if you want it but not front and center). The videos are a nice mix of stretch, strength, balance, core workouts, and cardio, and they add new ones pretty frequently. You can select videos by duration, from 5 to 45 minutes, or put together a playlist of shorter videos for one continuous workout session. As far as I know it's not limited to the U.S. The same company does YogaGlo, which I also like but I'm not so focused on yoga specifically.posted by chickenmagazine at 8:52 AM on January 7, 2013

These videos on YouTube from Fitness Blender look pretty dang awesome, especially if you're looking for different levels and variety. I hope they are available in Canada for you!posted by THAT William Mize at 10:40 AM on January 7, 2013

I wonder if it would help you to narrow it down a bit if you specified your goals a bit better? I adore yoga, but unless you go out of your way to make it so, it's not great for cardiovascular fitness, and neither is pilates. They're good for posture and flexibility.

If you want to bounce around and improve your cardiovascular health then anything like zumba or similar would be good and fun.

If you want to improve your strength it would be something different again.

These are all exciting and worthwhile things to work on, but they're quite different and will lead you to different videos. Personally, I do yoga (though I prefer classes), I suffer through pilates when I feel my posture needs a checkup, I attend tae kwon do classes for fitness and I practice bodyweight exercises for strength (as I am pathetic enough that that is quite enough weight).posted by kadia_a at 12:17 PM on January 7, 2013

I subscribe to PilatesAnytime and I love it. It's such a huge time savings over leaving the house for classes and the instructors have really good cues to help you follow along.

I would say that if you haven't taken pilates live before, you should go to a few classes to get the swing of things before doing videos at home. A lot of the movements are pretty subtle.

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